Denver Snow Adventure
by ZoeandDan2gether4ever
Summary: On a ski trip to clebrate Fran & Max's engagement, something, as always, goes terribly wrong.


**Denver Snow Adventure: A "The Nanny" Story**

By: Kim Bishop

Author's Note: I'm going to expand the timetable from episode 5.15 "The Engagement" to episode 5.22 "The Wedding" from about 1 and ¾ months to about 6 and ½ months, giving my story enough time to occur. are authors' notes in the story. Words are thoughts. Summary: While in Denver on a ski trip to celebrate Fran & Maxwell's engagement, something, as always, goes terribly wrong.

Category: Romance/Angst

Rating: PG-13 Disclaimer: I DO NOT OWN THESE CHARACTERS! DO NOT SUE ME!

"Well, everyone, are we ready to go?" Maxwell Sheffield asked his three children, Maggie, Brighton, and Gracie, his butler, Niles, and his fiancée, Fran. They were going on a ski trip to Denver for three and ½ weeks to celebrate his & Fran's engagement. He had invited his business partner, C.C., also, but when she learned Niles was going, she suddenly had the flu and could not come. Maggie, the oldest at nineteen, was ready to go. She wanted to go just to meet cute guys. Brighton, who was fifteen, already had met some cute girls over the Internet and probably was not going to spend much time with the family. Gracie, who at eleven was the "baby" of the family, was just going to spend the time skiing with Niles, her dad, and her soon-to-be stepmom. The family loaded into the limousine, with Maxwell in one of the seats, Fran at his side, and the three kids in the way back seat, which seated three. Niles was driving. ½ an hour later, the family crammed into the six seats reserved for them. Maxwell and Fran were in row A, seats 2 and 3, the kids were five rows back, row F, seats 1,2, and 3, and Niles was five rows back from the kids, row N, seat 3.Five and ½ hours later, the brood arrived in Denver. The flight attendant woke up Maxwell, who woke up Fran, who went five rows back and woke up Maggie, who then woke up Brighton, who in turn woke up Gracie, who also went back five rows back and woke up Niles. An hour and ½ later, the limousine that the family was renting pulled up to the most gorgeous six-room cabin they had ever seen. They were exhausted, so they all decided to go to their rooms for a couple of hours to sleep and/or relax. At 2:00 P.M., the family all poured into the living room to watch movies until dinner. Comedies, including Happy Gilmore, romances, including Casablanca, and action dramas, including Con Air filled the room all afternoon with giggles, gasps, and tears. By 6:30 P.M., the family's stomachs growled. They ordered food to eat. By 9:30, everyone was ready for bed. After hugs, kisses, and good nights, everyone split up. Maggie, Gracie, and Fran were in one bedroom, Niles and Brighton took another, and Maxwell, the lucky dog, got one to himself. After Fran had fallen asleep, Maggie and Gracie looked at her left hand, grinning. There, glittering on the third finger in the defused light of the bedroom was the one thing they had thought that their father would never give Fran: an engagement ring. It was truly gorgeous, as Maxwell wanted the best ring at Cartier for his fiancée, of course.

The next afternoon

At 12:30 P.M., the family picked out a spot for them to meet in about two hours time. They split up: Niles, Fran, and Maxwell heading towards the many trails, while Brighton headed off with Maria, Hannah, Jasmine (she was called Jazzy or Jas by the brood), Ashley, Nicole (she was called Nikki by the brood), Heather, Erica, and Angela (she was called Angie or Angel by the brood), who were the eight girls he met on the Internet, Maggie headed for the lodge on cute guy patrol, and Gracie headed back to the cabin to read. Niles, Fran, and Maxwell skied together until they came to a place where the trail branched off in three directions. Maxwell went to the left, Fran went to the right, and Niles went down the center. Maxwell and Niles had never seen Fran so happy and relaxed. She was positively beaming. Since their engagement, Maxwell noted, she had only become more beautiful to him.

An hour and ½ later Fran loved the mountain air. Every so often, she would stop to glance down at her left hand. Seeing the dazzling thirteen-carat diamond engagement ring that she and Maxwell had picked out at Cartier just seven days after he had proposed to her sparkling in the sunlight, she grinned like a Cheshire cat. She was going to become the wife of a millionaire (who, by the way, was a very successful Broadway producer), a stepmother to the three most wonderful children on the face of the earth, and she was slowly moving from middle class to upper class society. She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she completely missed the turn off to their meeting spot.  
An hour and 45 min. later Maxwell Sheffield was scared. Five of the six members of his family, including him, had returned to their meeting spot. The only person missing was his fiancée, Fran. Two or three years ago, when she was still just his children's nanny, he would have been uneasy, maybe just a little worried. Now that she was his fiancée, he was downright scared that something had happened to her. She was never late for one of these "check-ins"- as she called them, but now she was an hour and 15 minutes late. The reason Max wanted his family inside and not on the slopes or trails was because there was a snowstorm coming. Since Fran was not here, he was alarmed that the snowstorm had come earlier than expected and Fran was right in the middle of it. He had to find her, but he knew he could not go alone. Suddenly, an idea popped up into his brain. He said, "Maggie, take your brother and sister into the cabin and do not move until I come back. Niles, you are coming with me to find Fran! Do you both understand what I have just told you?" Both Maggie and Niles nodded. Maggie took Brighton and Gracie into the cabin to watch T.V. Niles checked to see if they had everything. Max, meanwhile, sent up a quick, silent prayer to his late wife, Sarah. "Sarah, help me find her. I know you sent her to me. I have come so close to losing her so many times, I have lost count. I lost you. Please, God, please, do not take Fran from me too. If I lost her, it would be like losing you twenty times over. I could not go through that again. Keep her safe." Twenty minutes later, they were ready to go. Niles had packed every thing they needed/might need into a pack, including thermal blankets, spikes, climbing rope, flashlight, earmuffs, and first aid kit. Max hauled the pack onto his back, slipped into his snowshoes, and marched forward in the deep, deep, deep snow, anxiously awaiting the moment he found his fiancée and brought her back to the cabin, a place where he knew that she would be safe and warm from the harm of the impending storm. He was scared of the state Fran would be in when he found her. Max found himself asking many questions, many of which he did not know the answers to. Would she be unconscious or frozen? Would he need the climbing gear that Niles had placed in the pack to get to his fiancée? How long would it take to find her and bring her back to the cabin, the one place he knows she will be warm and safe? The questions are plenty, and the answers are quite scarce.

Two and ½ hours later

Already two and ½ hours have passed, and Max and Niles are no closer to finding Fran then they were when they started. Niles is starting to get discouraged, but Max knows he will not give up until he has found his beautiful fiancée, his beautiful Fran, and he had her safely wrapped up in his arms, hopefully conscious, carrying her back to the cabin. He had, idiotically, waited 5 years to profess his love to Fran and propose to her, he could not and would not let her go this easily. He would not give up on her! Only a month had passed since he proposed to her! He wants to send Niles back to the cabin to help Maggie watch the children and to keep away his negativity so he could concentrate, but he knows Maggie is responsible. Besides, he needs Niles to go back and find a SAR team once they find Fran. So what could he do? He could stuff his ears full of snow or try the earmuffs, but then he would not be able to hear Fran if, miraculously, she was conscious and called out to him. He decided to look for Fran on his own. "Niles," he called, spotting a huge tree with a 10 ft long log by it and a 7 ft high boulder, "I'm going to search for Fran on my own. Come over here. I'll meet you here in about an hour and a half." Then Maxwell walked off to try to find the second love of his life.

45 minutes later

Fran walked back to the cabin after she had been found wandering by the patrol squad about 30 minutes ago. She just wanted to stay in the cabin with Niles, her soon-to-be stepkids, and her fiancé. She knocked on the door because she left the key inside, and greeted by Gracie. She yelled, "Oh, Fran, you're back! Maggie, Brighton, Fran's back!" Maggie and Brighton appeared and ran to her, "Fran! Dad has been worried sick! He left about 3 hours and 15 minutes ago to find you when you did not show up at 2:30 like we planned." The snow was just starting to fall at 2:30, but it was now 5:45 and the snow was accumulating faster than it was even 10 to 15 minutes ago. She looked out the window at the 5 to 10 inches of snow that had already fallen. "Oh, my God!" Fran breathed, trying to calm down. She wanted to, no, she had to go back out there, Max, the love of her life and the man of her dreams, who was also her fiancé was out there! No! She thought, I could not go back out there. The sun is going down, I know Maggie will want to do something other than watch Gracie, and I cannot risk getting myself lost again. On the other hand, Max is out there, and I am so worried about him. She made up her mind, even though she loves Max, she will not risk getting herself lost in the woods again, this time after dark, getting hypothermia, and leaving the kids, especially Gracie, without a mother again. For Gracie, Fran knows she has been the only mother that she has ever known, with her being only two when Sarah died. Fran sighed, went back to the fireplace, pulled Gracie to her for a hug, which resulted in Gracie sitting on her lap, and called for Maggie and Brighton to sit on the couch. Therefore, on the couch, it is Fran in the middle with her eleven year old soon-to-be stepdaughter Gracie on her lap hugging her, with her nineteen year old soon-to-be stepdaughter Maggie leaning in for a comforting hug on her right, and her fifteen year old soon-to-be stepson Brighton doing the same on her left. She smiled, and kissed each one on the top of their head. They all sat there, silent. Eventually, Gracie scrambled down from Fran's lap to allow her access to the Chinese that they had leftover from last night and warm it up in the microwave for their evening meal.

45 minutes later- in the woods

Max shook his head. After an hour and a half of searching for Fran without Niles' negativity, he still had not found her. After searching all over for 4 hours, Max knew that his chances of finding Fran alive were growing slimmer by the minute. He trudged back to the tree where he would meet Niles with a heavy heart. He could only hope that Niles had found her and she was waiting, along with Niles, for his return. As he walked along the trail that would lead him to the tree, he thought back to London, and the romance that he and Fran shared when she had snuck off to be with him there. They had seen Celine Dion in concert and then some interesting things had almost happened. Max's face brightened at the memory, then returned to its natural color at the thought of Niles' heart attack. It brightened again almost immediately when he thought of the kiss that he and Fran had shared in the hospital bed. I wonder how far we would have gone with that if C.C. had not interrupted, he thought. Rolling his eyes, he kept going on the path that would lead him to Niles and hopefully, his fiancée as well. Two minutes later, he strolled out of the woods and ran to the place where Niles would meet him. Since Niles was not there, he allowed a spark of hope to flood through him. If Niles was not there yet, then it was possible that he had found Fran. Please God, have mercy on me, he thought. You would not take another woman that I love and adore from me, would You? About three minutes later, Niles came jogging up the path from the opposite direction that Max had taken when they had split up an hour and a half ago. Seeing Max's face, which was still full of hope, Niles hated that he had to be the one to extinguish it. He said, "I'm sorry sir. There's absolutely, positively no sign of her anywhere." Upon hearing this, Maxwell Sheffield's face fell. Although it had been 4 hours since he had last seen Fran, he could not, no; he would not let himself give in to the painfully obvious: Fran, his fiancée, the woman he loved and adored with all of his heart, and the mother of his children for the last 5 years, was either missing or dead. "Oh, God, no! Why couldn't I have taken us camping!" he sobbed, breaking down in tears and not afraid to do it in front of his butler. Niles looked on in sympathy. He knew that Max was blaming himself, and he also knew that Max couldn't have known that this would happen, and he voiced his opinion openly by saying, "Sir, you couldn't have known that this would happen." Niles let he think for a minute and then said, "Sir, is it possible that Miss Fine has found her way back to the cabin in spite of the snow or was picked up by the Search and Rescue team? Could that be the reason why we have not found her?" As Niles watched, Max's face became a whole lot brighter. He said, "Niles, old man, you're a genius! I think that is where Fran is! Let's go!" Knowing that he could be one step closer to finding his fiancée, Max picked up the pace until he was almost running in his snowshoes towards the cabin. 20 minutes later, after running almost ¾ of the way before being picked up by a patrol squad, Max and Niles stood in front of the cabin. Running to the door, both Max and Niles realized that they had left their keys inside. Max knocked on the door, secretly hoping that Fran would answer it. Sure enough, as the door pulled open, Max saw that Fran had answered the door and was standing there in all her glory. Once Fran realized it was Max, she fell to her knees crying, "Oh, Max, it's you! I thought I'd never see you again!" and she kissed him for all he was worth. Max responded, "Oh, Fran! You bloody scared the hell out of me when you did not show up this afternoon! What are you trying to do, give me a heart attack? I thought you were dead! Losing you is not my idea of a joke!" and he kissed her back. That night, the whole family crowed in the family room, not to watch movies, but just to be close to one another. Max held Fran on his lap. After their scare this afternoon, both of them just needed to be close to each other. Once the kids were asleep, Max went out to the couch to think. I came so close to losing Fran today. Closer than I ever want to risk again. He thought, as he walked out to the couch. To his surprise, Fran was sound asleep on the couch. He hated to wake her, so he picked her up in his arms and carried her to his bedroom. He did not think, he just did. Besides, he wanted and needed her close to him. This day will haunt me for the rest of my life. He thought. He hugged Fran to him, grateful that she was okay and sleeping peacefully in his arms. _Thank you, Sarah, for giving her to me. I will always be grateful to you for sparing her._ He happily thought.

Epilogue: Two months later, Fran and Max were happily married. Two months after that, the adoption went through. In addition, two years and four months after their wedding, Fran and Maxwell Sheffield welcomed identical triplets, Dana Nicole Sheffield, Angela Marie Sheffield, and Sarah Alexandra Sheffield into the world.

**The End**

Writer's Thanks: Shirah, you are the best! Thanks for the ideas on how to end this story! This one is for you! My dear friends, who once said to me that I can do anything I put my mind to! You guys rule!


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